Mostly, I present the attacks on science as a cause for concern, but two stories making the rounds on the science blogs have left me more amused than worried, so I thought I'd share something a bit more lighthearted. Besides, this gives me a chance to pick on countries other than the US. I stumbled across the first story at Pharyngula. Published in a specialized medical journal, it is a scholarly article that uses a deconstructive analysis to determine that the Evidence Based Health Care (EBHC) movement is a form of fascist totalitarianism. No, I am not making that up. EBHC is based on the concept that, should we have scientific evidence that say, bacteria cause ulcers, we should take advantage of that and prescribe antibiotics to patients with ulcers. The authors, however, state, "the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena." And that's one of the more moderate statements in a piece that extensively quotes authors like Hannah Arendt and George Orwell.

One of the funny things here is that there are a few valid points that seem to be made in the article, but they're buried in so much inflammatory and impenetrable language, that the authors are clearly shooting themselves in their collective feet. Health care has been prone to fads, and we should be cautious about relying overly on a recently-developed approach. Not all diseases are well studied enough to have EBHC applied, and there are other complicating factors (additional conditions, patient concerns) that need to be included in medical decisions. The authors even explicitly raise a valid concern: if EBHC suggests a diagnosis where a patient has a 40 percent chance of developing cancer, deciding what that actually means for an individual patient is perhaps the most significant part of the medical practice.

But why let these valid concerns interfere with some raging paranoid overstatements? The authors instead critique a caricature of EBHC that I can't imagine anyone actually advocating, one which refuses to accept anything other than a double-blind clinical trial as evidence, and actively works to suppress alternate ways of knowing in a manner akin to the fascist regimes of the 1940s. The authors suggest that EBHC leaves its opponents no choice but war: "It is fair to assert that the critical intellectuals are at ‘war’ with those who have no regards other than for an evidence-based logic. The war metaphor speaks to the ‘critical and theoretical revolt’ that is needed to disrupt and resist the fascist order of scientific knowledge development."

Right. I'm still not certain the whole thing wasn't a joke. From the fine Canadians who brought us that paper, we move on to Africa, where an article on some goings on in Kenya was brought to my attention by The Panda's Thumb. Kenya has been the stomping grounds of the Leakeys, who have found some of the fossils that have been crucial to understanding early human origins. Although an essential part of the global human heritage, these fossils have remained in Kenya, and been proudly displayed in its national museum. Currently, the EU is helping to finance an expansion and renovation of the museum that will better preserve and display them.

A project that helps preserve our collective cultural heritage while maintaining it in its nation of origin—what's not to like? Apparently, the existence of the fossils themselves. The article details a pressure campaign by a local Christian group that wants them removed from their prominent display because, "Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory." Good to know that both a general discomfort with science and the old "just a theory" argument work in just about any cultural context.